Posts tagged with: Fraser Institute in Canada

Alejandro Chafuen, president and chief executive officer of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and board member of the Acton Institute, recently wrote a piece for Forbes.com discussing youth unemployment in the United States. According to the latest report, U.S. youth unemployment is at 16.2 percent which is more than double the adult unemployment rate. The unemployment rate for youth in Europe is currently at 24 percent. Chafuen asks, “Can we learn from the European experience?”

Using data compiled by the economic freedom indices of the Fraser Institute in Canada, and the Heritage Foundation, in the United States, we recently looked at how economic freedom, labor regulations, social spending, and regulatory climate, correlated with youth unemployment. Against our preconceptions, at least as shown with our simple static analysis, there were no convincing results. I will spare the reader the statistical jargon and graphs and focus on apparent contradictions. (more…)